Year One in Action

A Month-by-Month Guide to Taking Early Years Pedagogy into KS1

Anna Ephgrave

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317267683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Children are 'hard-wired' to learn and they learn best by being active and autonomous – exploring, discovering, creating and taking risks, in other words, by playing. However, formal, subject specific lessons and a focus on data, targets and unrealistic expectations are causing young children to be bored and stressed and this is stifling their learning. Year One in Action reveals the remarkable progress children can make when they are allowed to pursue their own interests, ideas and challenges in a superb and enabling environment supported by responsive, skilled and empathic staff.

Demonstrating how a child-led approach supports the development of purposeful, calm, confident and independent children, this book offers a unique month-by-month insight into the workings of a highly successful Year One class. It covers all aspects of practice from timetabling, adult roles and transitions to the organisation of the classroom and outside area. It tracks the events of each month in the year, paying close attention to the physical environment and the learning that is taking place. Interactions between staff and children are recognised as, and exploited as, teaching opportunities. Throughout the book, Anna Ephgrave gives the reasons behind each decision made. She also explains what the outcomes have been for the children, emphasising that a child-led approach, with planning in the moment, enables rich learning across the curriculum for all children within a meaningful context.

Key features include:

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• over 150 full colour photographs to illustrate practice;

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• photocopiable pages of planning sheets, record keeping sheets and sample letters to parents
  
  

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• examples of individual learning journeys and planning in the moment;

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• guidance on what to look for when assessing children's progress;

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• advice on risk/benefit assessments;

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• suggestions for managing transitions and minimising stress.

The achievements of these children have been remarkable and they have remained the enthusiastic, independent, happy and unique individuals that they were when they came into Year One. Written by a leading consultant teacher, this book will inspire teachers to be brave and do what is right for children – let them take the lead, trust that they want to learn and above all let them play!

1 September

A unique month, a unique chapter

TO DO LIST

● Attend staff training.

● Prepare the class environment – indoors and outside.

● Prepare coat peg, self-register and an individual folder for each child.

● Welcome and support children and their families.

● Focus on PSE to ensure children are happy and expectations of behaviour are clear.

● Start first cycle of focus children.

● Start first cycle of parent meetings.

● Begin to record the learning and development of group activities.

Organisation

September is a critical month for any year group in school. It is the month in which expectations, routines and boundaries are established and consistently applied. Within these firm and clear guidelines, the children can then relax. It is only in this relaxed state that children can become deeply involved in their learning. They do not have to worry about what is going to happen, or what mood the adults are going to be in, or whether the resources they need are going to be available. They know what to expect, they know how to behave, they know the adults are going to keep them safe, they know they are valued and liked. In this state, they are ‘safe’ (emotionally and physically) to relax and to take risks – i.e. to try something new, a new experience, a new challenge, some new learning. As critical as it is, we need the transition period to be as quick and seamless as possible so that the children settle immediately, ensuring that no learning time is missed. This requires meticulous planning and preparation. Much of this work was started in the Summer Term and will be described in later chapters of this book. Here I will set out the work we do in September and how the children are inducted into their new year.

This chapter is organised a little differently to other chapters with a brief explanation of induction and the timetable, followed by an overview of the principles for an enabling environment, a look at behaviour management and then conflict resolution. The diary section gives just a hint at the vast amount of learning that took place in just the first few weeks of the year.

Day one

It is usually the case that nearly all the children joining Year One were in the same school for their Reception year and that was the case at Carterhatch in September 2015. Therefore we knew the children and their families and the children knew the staff and the environment. On the first morning, the staff that had been in Reception were at the gate to welcome the children and to take them into their new classes. The parents were encouraged to say goodbye at the gate. All but three of the children were absolutely confident to do this; they were delighted to see their friends and their old teachers, excited about going into their new class and happy to wave goodbye to their parents. A few children needed a parent to support them and this was accepted too. As with many schools, the logistics are difficult and it is just not possible to have 90 children, their parents and often their siblings too, all coming into the classrooms. Because we knew the children so well, we were confident that they would be happy with this system and indeed they were – within ten minutes of arriving, they were all engaged in their play and the parents had said goodbye.

Timetable

Our aim with the timetable in Year One is to maximise the length of periods during which the children are in control of their learning – i.e. the amount of time they are ‘playing’. Therefore we have opted not to have morning or afternoon breaks, the children are not going to assembly, they do not leave the class for music, ICT or any other subject. In the first half term, they are also getting all their physical education within the class and garden environment, but PE lessons will be introduced after the first half term. The short adult-led inputs are either at the start or end of sessions, again to avoid interruptions. So the timetable for the first two weeks is very simple:

8.50 – 12.00	12.00 – 12.15	1.25 – 3.00	3.00 – 3.15
Self-register, Free-flow play Tidy up	Whole-class group time	Free-flow play Tidy up	Whole-class group time

(Self-registration involves the children ticking their name on a list. The adults also complete an electronic official register.) Lunch is 12.15 – 1.25.

Thus in the first two weeks the children have over four hours of free-flow play. During this time the children are deeply involved – purposeful, independent, confident, creative, energetic, enthusiastic, risk-taking, operating at their limits, co-operating, investigating, discovering, communicating – in other words – THEY ARE LEARNING! These 90 children were learning like this in their Reception year and made outstanding progress. We know them very well and we know that they thrive with this autonomous style of learning and we therefore want it to continue in Year One. In the diary section below, you can read about some of the amazing learning that happened in these first few weeks and hopefully any doubts about the value of ‘play’ will be dispelled.

In the second half of September, we gradually introduced three short adult-led sessions. Therefore by the end of September the daily timetable became:

The children still have over three hours of free-flow play, during which they can apply the skills and knowledge that they have gained in the reading, phonics and maths sessions. However, how and for what purpose they apply these will be unique to each child. In this way they are able to maintain their autonomy and can pursue their own interests as the diary sections will illustrate. No two children will have the same experience – their journey will be uniquely suited to them as individuals.

The adult-led sessions are pre-planned according to the assessments and information that we have for the children in Year One. The vast majority of this information was obtained from assessments carried out by the Reception teachers and, where necessary, adjusted according to observations made in the early part of Year One. The school has opted to follow a reading and maths programme in which children are in small groups with an adult each day. They also follow letters and sounds for the phonic work and these sessions are delivered by the Year One staff. For the purposes of this book, I am not going to detail the work in these sessions. There are vast amounts of materials available to support the teaching of such sessions and each school needs to find a programme that they wish to deliver. As with everything else that we do, we use ‘Levels of Involvement’ to assess whether the sessions are of value. Remember, if children are not showing good levels of involvement, then they are not learning. We will continually monitor the value of these sessions and adjust their length or content accordingly. It is critical to remember that phonics, reading and maths are not an end in themselves. They are a means to an end. We need to give the children these skills in order that they can learn about other things. The phonics screening test (that is currently carried out in Year One) has been one of the most damaging, in terms of its effect on the curriculum in Year One. The emphasis on phonics has been dramatically and tragically exaggerated in many schools and the curriculum has been narrowed and simplified to the detriment of the children in Year One. We need to remember that if children (or adults!) are fascinated by a subject, then they will persevere, struggle and focus in order to learn. This will almost always involve aspects of language, literacy and maths. However, literacy and maths in isolation from anything interesting will not hold their attention, they will not persevere, struggle or focus and therefore the learning is much, much harder. Therefore the main content of this book will focus on the periods of the day when the children are applying these skills in their play. This is an area that has been neglected in educational materials and yet it is the most important part of the day for the children – the time when they are doing what interests them, when they are deeply involved and therefore when they are learning the most. These ‘free-flow’ sessions are not pre-planned – the adults observe and respond ‘in the moment’ as described in more detail in the next chapter.

These boys have chosen to write about their football match. They have collected their folders (see November chapter) to write in. It is also interesting to note that not one of them is sitting on a chair – even though the chairs are available.

Setting up the environment

An enabling environment

It is a hugely complex task to organise the highest quality free-flow play in which 90 children can be engaged. It is rather like a jigsa...